simplifying technology

Password-protect your MS-Word document

Microsoft Word utility is a commonly used application and many time you feel the need to Password-protect your MS-Word document . Sometimes, we wish only a selected group of people to have access to the data in our Word documents.

The MS-Word in Office 365 gives you several tools to encrypt and Password-protect your MS-Word document . Here is how you can do it:

Step-1: Open the document you want to protect in MS Word.
Step-2: Click on ‘File’ and go to Info, click on ‘Protect Document’ next.
Step-3: Now, click on ‘Encrypt with Password’ option.
Step-4: The ‘Encrypt Document’ window will open next; you’ve to give a password for the document. The password is case-sensitive. After creating the password, click ‘OK’.
Step-5: Type the password again for the confirmation. Click ‘OK’.
Step-6: Save the document again and close it.
Step-7: Open the document again. Now, to access the document, you will have to use the password. Type in password and click ‘OK’ to open the document.

If you want to remove the password, here are the steps:

Step-1: Click on ‘File’ and then click on ‘Protect Document’.
Step-2: Click on ‘Encrypt with Password’. At the next window, delete the dots that are hiding your password and then click ‘OK’.
Step-3: Save the document again and close it. When you open it the next time, you don’t have to enter the password and you can access it directly.

Note: The password that you use should ideally be complex and yet easy to remember. Because if you happen to forget it, there is no way you can retrieve or reset it, and hence, you will lose access to your own document. So, make sure that the password you give is easy to memorize. You can even write it down somewhere. This will help in case you forget it in the future.